Tweaking Your Mac

I haven’t done a book review on this blog so I thought I would give one a shot. I have just received a brand new copy of Switching To A Mac, A Portable Guide published by Wiley and written by Paul McFedries. Its a great little book which I have been reading over the last couple of days. If you want to pick up a copy the best place is Amazon where you can get a copy nice and cheap.

Christmas is fast approaching and if you want to be with the cool kids, Macs are the way to go. This post will hopefully explain the best Mac to buy for your family or friends. Ideally I should have done this post a little earlier but I have an unwritten rule that Christmas should not start until December.

I was asked by the developer Leonid to review his application called TranslateIt. The translator program that you can use to get simple translations of words without having to search the web or find a dictionary. It is very similar to Google Translate, although it is designed to run on your desktop. I don’t have a planned post for today so it seemed a good place to fit it in.

This is just going to be a quick review of a small application called Fantasktik. Fanktasktik is a small menu bar/application switcher that you can use to quickly navigate your applications. Its unobtrusive and easy to use. It also has some interesting features which enable you to switch applications quickly.

The title of this posts makes this application sound like it is the run of the mill app for showing you resources information about your Mac. By resources I mean, CPU, memory, hard drive etc. All of the little pieces of hardware that make your Mac tick. This application, although shows this information, does it in a very unique and different way. I think it is quite funky and very different to the normal numbers on a window which you normally see. The style of this app reminds me of a gauge that you will see on a complicated piece of machinery. To you it looks a random mess of lines and shapes, but to a trained user it shows a whole range of information. This application is very similar to that.

One of the biggest games to hit the market at the moment is Spore. It is every where at the moment, on PC’s, Macs, Nintendo DS’s and best of all the iPhone. The game in a nutshell, if you have not heard of the title, consists of you working your way up from a small microscopic organism. Evolving along the way changing your appearance, statistics, your looks and so on. You move on from being a small cell, to a larger creature. You then move on from being a single creature to controlling the tribe, then a city and finally a universe. Each stage being more complex than the last. Although this game comes in many forms for many formats, I am going to focus on the Mac and PC version. They are both identical in nature. In fact they come on the same disk.

Yesterday I mentioned about Ten Time Wasting Apps. One of the applications on the list was Frenzic. I was so impressed by how fun and addicting this game was I felt it deserved a full review. This idea behind Frenzic is pretty simple. You have to fill up the out circles (or pie’s) with the piece you are given. When you fill up a circle you get some points. The more points the higher you will be placed on the leader board.

Its been a long time since I have done a comparison between two applications. This post will compare the two applications Checkout and Lightspeed. Theses applications are both designed for shops. They are applications which are designed to help shop employees sell their products. I am interested in this type of product since they are always well built and do have a lot of features. These two products are priced differently for different markets, as you will see from this post. This review will be split up into different sections, installation, interface, ease of use, price and finally my recommendation.

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About

I'm James, and I have been a Mac user for years. Over this time I have found loads of tips and tricks which have helped me get the most out of my Mac, so I decided to share them with you all. For more info see my about page.

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